CoFi Simulator

Inspiration

Many students are ill-informed about their financial future, thus we decided to create a game that would help them emulate their future situations if they don't manage their finances effectively. We thought about things that would cause people to go into major debt after college and ways to help prevent that. Including aspects such as insurance, work, tuition, etc. it helps the player understand how to manage their time and money effectively.

What it does

This simulator promotes smart financial decision-making/advice for college students. The game consists of a character who has a budget that they need to organize and spend wisely by paying tuition and bills. As well as spending, self-care, and not burning out are essential in this game and college as well. For example, if you don't maintain your health bar, you lose money. In reality, if you don’t care for your health, you can get ill! The game gives the player real tips that can come in handy in actual life situations, but, finance should not be seen as stressful, so this is a fun game to learn and have fun.

How we built it

Using python, pygame aseprite, and pixel art to design our 2D game. We attempted to use statistically accurate information about finance, work, and college life to create a game that would demonstrate the difficulties of financing. By allocating the work based on our strong suits, we worked quickly and effectively as a team to create CoFi Simulator.

Challenges we ran into

Our initial challenge was to download a medium to create our game so we wanted to go with Unity, however, the wifi was taking too long to download the game. In the end, we switched gears and moved to pygame because it had a faster download speed. To create a game you need art to make the game aesthetically pleasing, however, we are not artists but we did the best we could with a simple medium pixel art. With pixel art and aseprite it made drawing and implementing the art easier and simpler. In the actual code, implementing the collisions was the most time-consuming because there were a lot of objects/furniture to account for.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the graphic designs such as the computer, and we also are impressed by our implementation of collisions. In addition, the fade out in effect for the sleep function is another aspect that we are proud of because it plays a major role in our game. Furthermore, creating the overall self-care functions is another because it requires a lot of changing and editing in order for it to work. This project took a lot of time, but our team is proud of the amount we got to learn and the effort we put in.

What we learned

We learned how to use python/pygame during the creation of the game. In addition, our team learned some valuable financial information. Such as, what should be classified as a need: products or services that support the organism (50%) What is classified as a want: any other product or service that you use (30%), what is classified as savings: money not spent but put off for future (college, retirement, etc.) (20%). The percentages represent how much of your income you should be investing in each category. Poor financial choices is one of the main reasons many face financial instability/hardship.

What's next for CoFi Simulator

What we had planned to add into our game is investing, however, due to time limitations we couldn't implement that aspect. Thus, the next thing that we would add to our game would be including information about investing in the stock market. We planned to add an option for which kind of stock the user would buy, such as an index fund, and the consequences of it. To further improve CoFi, we would like to add as many factors of finance as we can to make it much more informational, and useful.

Built With

• github
• pygame
• python